Shooting a firearm or air gun device accurately requires that many variables be taken into consideration—human steadiness or lack thereof, angle of shot (uphill or downhill), distance, bullet ballistic information (velocity, sensitivity to wind), and wind speed all affect the accuracy of a given shot. The problem is that there is no way for most shooters to integrate or eliminate all of these variables and make an accurate shot. This is particularly true for shots beyond 200 yards and shots at smaller targets. As a result, shots between 200 yards and 500 yards are rarely completed successfully. A typical shooter will introduce human jitter and trigger jerk somewhere between 2 and 15 minutes of angle (MOA). At 500 yards, a shooter could miss the target by up to 75 inches or more.
The issue of human steadiness is a critical one and has been addressed in the prior art. Most solutions tend to be approaches that involve the active stabilization of the rifle. An example is EP0898144 B1 in which, during a tracking mode, undesired motion is sensed by position sensors and the information is fed to inertial rate sensors make the barrel relatively immune to movement of the stock to facilitate the barrel remaining sighted on the tracked target. U.S. Pat. No. 7,055,278 describes a damper system for reducing vibrations during and after firing, that involves adding damper weights to the firearm. Similarly, PCT application WO8102925 A1 describes a rifle with a stabilizing structure that receives the arm of the user so that forces are exerted upon the stabilizing structure by various surfaces of the shoulder or upper arm of the shooter. These design elements result in resistance to translational movements and rotational movements about any set of three mutually perpendicular axes.
All of these approaches might be termed as active stabilization of the rifle. They may help reduce tremor but can involve specially designed rifles or significantly cumbersome additions to known rifles.
There is a need for a different approach, one that can be applied to a wide variety of firearm or air gun devices, and that does not require cumbersome additions to the firearm or air gun devices. This is achieved in this description by using not active rifle stabilization but attitude tracking coupled with firing synchronization.